


Feed The People

by Raehimura



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Canon-Typical Horror, Eating Disorders, Flesh-Typical Meat, Gen, Horror, No Spoilers, Statement Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 18:10:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21123080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raehimura/pseuds/Raehimura
Summary: Statement of Kelly Watts, regarding a strange food bank and an encounter with ... meat. Original statement given July 5, 2012. Audio recording by Mary Butler, temporary archival assistant at the Magnus Institute.Have you ever been really hungry?





	Feed The People

Okay, right, this is Mary Butler, temporary archival assistant at the Magnus Institute, filling in for the main Archives crew, who are … indisposed. Umm, recording the statement of Kelly Watts, who traveled from the U.S. to make her statement about a, um, a strange food bank in Fort Worth, Texas. Original statement given July 5, 2012.

** [Statement begins] **

Have you ever been really hungry? I don't mean the normal oops-I-forgot-lunch, why-is-this-meeting-going-so-long, I-should-have-gone-grocery-shopping kind of hunger. I mean the kind that comes when you don't know where your next meal is coming from, when you have to choose between rent and food. I was never homeless, not really, but sometimes even 99 cent ramen is an expense you just can't afford, so you skip a meal or two. That combination of weakness and desperation, that primal fear of not having enough to sustain yourself, that's real hunger.

At least, I thought it was.

It started with the meat. It had been a tough month for me, hours cut at work and a couple unexpected bills coming due. Suffice it to say, minimum wage wasn’t cutting it. I could pretty much manage rent and other necessities, but that didn’t leave anything for even my usual meager food budget. I had a handful of programs I’d visit for help sometimes, food banks and the like, but it wasn’t a good time. June is a busy month for those programs, with kids home from school and missing their free lunches, and donations tend to get thin in the summer. I figured there were always people worse off than me, and I’d rather tough it out than fight over scraps.

Then Arnold Calle, at work, mentioned that he heard something about a new food bank opening up. I don’t think he knew how bad my situation was, but if he did, he did a good job of making the mention seem casual. He’d just heard that it was a new program, well funded, and that hardly anybody knew about it yet.

When I tried looking it up, I found out why: They had absolutely no online presence. Unusual, sure, but at the time I just figured they were too new. Besides, I had a name — Feed the People— and an address on Fourth Street, so I decided I would check it out.

The next morning was hot and bright, the air clinging to my skin even in my darkened bedroom. I remember thinking about how much worse it would be outside, how long the walk would be uptown. I was so tempted not to go. But my kitchen and my wallet were both empty, and I knew I’d regret it later if I didn’t.

If only I’d just stayed in bed.

The walk was just as long and miserable as I’d feared, and as I got closer to the address, I started worrying that it had all been in vain. The neighborhood started looking … industrial, with shuttered windows and condemned buildings scattered among what might have been warehouses. The whole thing was under heavy construction, with dirty scaffolding obscuring most of the street front. Sure, food banks and other social programs are often in poorer neighborhoods and crammed into whatever space they can find, appropriate for their services or not, but this place just looked … abandoned.

I had just had that thought, looking around an empty intersection under the broiling midday sun, that I saw the roadkill. It was nothing but a red smear of flesh in the middle of the road, maybe a raccoon or a particularly unlucky stray cat, and it wasn’t unusual to see that kind of thing in our fair city. No, what caught my attention wasn’t the viscera, but the birds.

The thing was surrounded by grackles. I don’t know if you have grackles here, but they’re fat black birds that sit in trees and scream and shit on cars. They’re annoying, but most Southerners seem to have a weird fondness for them, and I’m no exception. Except, they’re not exactly scavengers, and I’d never seen a whole crowd of them around roadkill before.

But as I stepped closer, I realized it wasn’t really a crowd. It was a circle. A perfect circle of birds with this dead thing in the very center. They seem to stare inward at it intently, barely moving except the occasionally twitch of a wing. I must have stood there staring for a good five minutes, and not a single bird moved the entire time. It was … creepy, definitely not natural, and it gave me the strangest feeling of seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see. But what was I going to do, turn around and go home empty handed because I got spooked by some birds?

So I stepped past them, and it was barely two more blocks before I found the address. It was a rundown building squeezed between two long-closed storefronts, but thankfully it did seem to be a real place: A sagging yellow banner poked out from the scaffolding announcing the name, though the last two words were mostly obscured by pieces of scrap wood, so that it really only said, “Feed.” Still, it was definitely the place, and I was so relieved when the door not only opened but greeted me with a cool blast of air-conditioning.

The inside was a little friendlier looking than the street, the usual waiting area with a few saggy chairs and brochures about healthy eating and other local services. Even a potted plant. The front desk was manned by a sallow-skinned older guy with a stern face. Behind him were two doors: One navy blue and one a bright, surprising red.

I introduced myself and said I was there for the food bank, expecting to be handed the usual sheath of forms and told to take a seat. I could see the man’s wrinkled hand hovering over a stack of clipboards. But instead, he just stared at me, into my eyes, like he was scrutinizing me for something. I was so taken aback that I let a long moment pass without speaking or looking away. I was finally about to ask if something was wrong or if I had the wrong place, when he just nodded and turned away from the desk entirely, pointing to the red door.

“It’s this way, through that door,” he said. And then: “Take as much as you need.”

It was weird, yeah. I mean, the not filling out paperwork and the creepy old man and even the bright red door, none of it made sense. But it’s easy, so easy, to ignore your instincts when you’re desperate for help.

I went through the door.

Behind it was an impossibly large room, laid out like the biggest grocery store I’d ever seen. Rows and rows of shelves filled with what seemed like a random assortment of foods. I could see a back wall at the end of the aisle in front of me, far in the distance, but looking left and right, I couldn’t see an end to the rows in either direction. It was disorienting, but surely it was just a trick of the space, right? Something about the layout and the harsh fluorescent lighting making it seem bigger than it was. Bigger than it could possibly be. And anyway, I was a little distracted by all that _food._

I wandered down an aisle, trying to get the lay of the place, marveling at the sheer abundance on the shelves. Forget food banks, I’d never seen a real store this overflowing with options. I passed fluffy loaves of bread in every shade of brown, rows and rows of nut butters, and a whole forest of vegetables, some of which I’d never even seen before. At a break in the shelves, I peered over into the next aisle and saw canned food stretching as far as I could see, brightly colored labels blending into a long technicolor smear. 

At one point, I passed by a bag of my favorite chips, this local brand I’ve been obsessed with since high school, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to open a bag in the facility. It looked like I was the only one there, and the guy had said to take as much as I needed. So I pulled it open and popped a chip into my mouth. And immediately spit it back out.

It tasted acrid, sharp, that chemical tang you get from artificial products well past their expiration date. Don’t ask me how I know that, but trust me, it was the taste of chips that had been sitting in some warehouse for years. It was gross, but not entirely surprising — people didn’t often pay attention to the quality of the food they donated, and sometimes it accidentally made it onto food bank shelves. I just resolved to tell the grumpy old man out front to check their chip supply and kept browsing.

When I came upon another shelf of produce, this time full of fruit, I thought I’d try again for a little snack. The fruit was all surprisingly perfect, shining and large and colorful, with not a bruise to be seen among them. I grabbed a plump red apple and bit into it. It was crisp, the flesh parting with a perfect crunch and a little spray of juice. But when I chewed, I promptly gagged again and spit it out.

The flesh of the apple was white and clean and had been crisp on my teeth. It looked and felt perfect, but it tasted like mealy rot. It was … impossible. Tasting like that, it should have been half-way to completely rotted, but it looked perfect enough to be in a damn commercial. Finally, that feeling that something was wrong with this place became impossible to ignore, and I decided to leave. I figured I could always come check it out again, maybe with a friend, but all of this was just too freaky for me to deal with.

When I turned back the way I’d come, though, I couldn’t see the door. Everything looked different, subtly, and as I walked back through the shelves I didn’t see any of the same food I had passed before. I started walking faster, figuring I could just get to the end of the aisle and then see the door from there. Surely I hadn’t wandered too far in the twenty or so minutes I’d been in there. But when I got to the end of the aisle, the door was nowhere to be seen. It just wasn’t there. I must have walked up and down the aisles for an hour or so trying to figure out how I had gotten so lost, but there just wasn’t a door.

There was a wall at the front and back of the place, and I tried pounding on the wall and yelling for help. I might have been embarrassed, but at that point I just wanted out of there, and it was their fault they’d built a damn labyrinth. I couldn’t have been the first person to be lost. But no matter how I banged or yelled or ran down aisles screaming, no one came. There wasn’t a sound that wasn’t my own hysterics or the buzz of the overhead lights.

I was understandably freaked out at this point, but I resolved to just wander the aisles for a while. Either I’d find the door or another person somewhere in this massive place, or eventually the old man would realize I hadn’t come back and someone would come looking for me.

I don’t know how long I wandered, but it felt like it had been a couple hours at least, when I found it. Or maybe it found me. I don’t know anymore. It was an opening in the aisles, like a little clearing, and in the middle of it was an open-backed freezer counter, like a deli counter. There was no one working it, of course, and it was mostly empty, except for one cut of meat. I say cut, but it was more like a pile, red and bloody like beef but a strange texture, partway between ground beef and some kind of slices. It was just sitting there, perfectly innocuous if a bit unappealing, and that should have been it. But I found myself weirdly … drawn to it. There was something about it, something that had me staring at it and stepping closer. It was only when I’d pressed my face up to the glass that I could see it was … pulsing slightly.

I lost it a bit then. I remember screaming and running, but the next few hours were a bit of a blur. The next thing I remember clearly is looking down at my watch and realizing it was after 10 at night. Well past time for the place to have closed. No one was coming for me.

I stayed up that night, wandering the aisles, trying to make some sense of the layout of that place. If I could just map it out in my head, surely I could find an exit. By the end of the next day, I was exhausted and starving. I had tried more of the food, of course, hoping to find something edible. But though everything on those shelves looked perfect, everything tasted like rot and decay. At the end of the second day, I had given up trying to eat, having tasted a little bit of everything I could find. Everything but that meat.

The meat followed me. I know how that sounds, but it’s the only way I can describe it. No matter where I walked or how I turned, I couldn’t go an hour without finding myself back at that counter, staring at that pulsing pile of something’s flesh.

I made it five days. It was hard to track time in that place. There was no natural light, and the fluorescent bulbs overhead never dimmed.I never saw any sign of another person, and I never found anything but the never-ending maze of shelves and their deceptive food. Sleep, of course, came difficult. But if my watch could be trusted, it was on the fifth day that I finally gave in.

It was the hunger. I was more hungry than I had ever been, more hungry than I could possibly describe. I had long passed the gnawing stage, where it feels like your stomach is eating itself in desperation, and moved on to weakness and hallucinations. I don’t know if it should have been that bad after only five days, but it felt like I had been weeks without food, like I might never eat again.

It was in that state, half out of my mind and desperate to make the gnawing need stop, that I found myself at that counter again, my face pressed close to the cool glass, watching in rapt fascination as the meat pulsed. A steady rhythm, like a heartbeat or breathing lungs. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew: That meat was the only edible thing in the whole damn place. I would eat it, or I would starve.

I did hesitate, but not as long as I should have. It was raw meat, for god’s sake, and clearly something was deeply wrong with it. Something was deeply wrong with all of this. But what did any of that matter when the alternative was starving to death? At least this way, if I died, I might die without that horrible emptiness in my gut.

So I rounded the counter, stuck my fingers into the soft meat and tore off a bloody chunk. I swallowed the first bit whole, afraid it would taste as rotten as everything else. It was thick and metallic, but it tasted like food. I could feel it still pulsing all the way down my throat. But even that wasn’t enough to stop me, and in a matter of minutes I had chewed through the entire pile. My face and hands were sticky, and some part of me was horrified at what I’d done, but my stomach was full with a heavy, warm weight and I felt … satiated. Filled. Satisfied.

It would be the last time I ever felt that way.

Are you familiar with the myth of Persephone? A Goddess in ancient Greece who travelled to the underworld. She ate the food of that place and then was bound to return there every year. I’ve thought about it a lot in the time since. 

I wasn’t trapped there in that hell, and god willing, I’m not doomed to return. Shortly after I’d eaten the meat, the old man came wandering down the aisle toward me and silently led me back to the door. I was speechless. I mean, what do you say? I just let him lead me back out into the lobby and then found myself blinking in the light of day on the sidewalk outside.

When I got home, I checked the day. It was the same day I had gone to the food bank. A little more than three hours had passed. My watch still told me I had spent five days in there.

So I got my freedom, and that was it. Except, it wasn’t. The feeling of fullness took a whole day to wear off, and I was a little anxious about food for a while. But eventually, I did have to eat again. I begged sick and asked a friend to get me some groceries. When I bit into that first apple, I knew what I was going to taste, but I still sobbed when that tang of rot filled my mouth. I worked my way through the whole bag of groceries, then through what little remained in my kitchen. Everything tasted of rot and dust. I cried for a long time that night.

Since then, I’ve tried different grocery stores, I've gone out to restaurants, I’ve eaten food at friends’ houses and even at the hospital. It’s all the same. I still get hungry, of course. But I can’t bring myself to eat this food that tastes like death.

When I collapsed from hunger at work they checked me into a hospital. Severe malnutrition. I tried to explain what was happening, but they couldn’t find anything physically wrong. They put me on a feeding tube for a while and then gave me the name of a good therapist. She thinks I have an eating disorder, but of course, nothing she tries has helped.

I’ve realized that I never really left that place. Maybe if I’d just stayed in bed that day. Maybe if I’d resisted longer, if I hadn’t eaten that damn meat.

I still think I feel it sometimes. In my stomach. Pulsing it's slow, steady rhythm. It’s the only thing I feel besides hunger.

** [Statement ends] **

Wow. Well, umm, the team did some follow up on this statement before they, uh, left. There is no record of Feed the People ever operating in Fort Worth, Texas, and the only charities we could find operating under that name have never had any operations in the region. The address given with this statement seems to currently be vacant, though without traveling to the U.S. ourselves it’s hard to check up on.

There’s not much else to verify here. Ms. Watts herself was indeed hospitalized for malnutrition in June of 2012, and then again several times in the ensuing years. From posts still available on her various social media accounts, she did seem to be seeing a therapist, though that treatment wasn’t very successful. Kelly Watts died of extended malnutrition in March 2014, just a week into her last hospital stay. She weighed just over six stone.

That’s what her official file says. What it doesn’t say, and I’m not entirely sure how the team got this information, is that just before she died Ms. Watts managed to get her hands on a sharp implement and mutilated her own stomach. From the smears of blood around her mouth when the nurses found her ... well, let's just say her last meal was probably meat.

[Sighs] Recording these statements is … It’s pretty exhausting. You know, my hometown is not too far from where Ms. Watts lived. I wonder what brought her all the way over here to make her statement?

I just - I hope the archival staff come back to work soon.


End file.
